digital arts
CHANGE
I
recently relocated from rural Pennsylvania to San Francisco, taking on
the exciting role of executive director at San Francisco Cinematheque.
Obviously, this is a huge geographical change, but it is also a return,
as I was involved with the Bay Area media arts community from 1974
until 1990. The renewal of my presence here has provoked many thoughts
for me about changes in this community. A recent Meredith Monk
performance shifted my thinking about change to the concept of
“impermanence,” which conjures images of flow, movement, and transition
as the way of life.
A CYCLICAL MODEL OF HISTORY
In introducing the texts of Hidden Histories, I would like to embrace this
utopian idea of pirate renegades creating intentional communities and
controlling the conditions by which they live and extend it to those
revolutionary moments in our own media arts histories as models of what
Hakim Bey has called “temporary autonomous zones”— places and
moments in which radical actions and creation occur outside of the
constrictions of societal norms and cultural controls.
These are zones
in which pirate media renegades can create, invent, and incubate in the
space of a generative moment.
